Pour en finir avec la prétendue synonymie de pareil et identique

Revue Romane ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 127-150
Author(s):  
Céline Corteel

The goal of this paper is to tease apart the semantic differences between pareil and identique. After a brief discussion of the syntactic and semantic properties shared by the two adjectives, attention is given to data illustrating their specificity. It is shown that identique is similar to symmetric relational adjectives. In an objective way, identique emphasizes a strong resemblance between distinct entities which usually have the same referential status. By contrast, pareil often serves to point out an asymmetric relationship between two referents, of which one tends to be more virtual than the other. The adjective often expresses a subjective judgment, allowing the speaker to focus (possibly by means of a type) on certain salient properties of a referent.

1986 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 131-151
Author(s):  
Stanislaw Karolak

This paper is concerned with the analysis of the theory of the French article presented in the classical work by Guillaume "Le problème de l'article et sa solution dans la langue française". The paper emphasizes Guillaume's search for the semantic nature of the relationships determining the distribution of articles. The paper supports Guillaume, who seems to claim, contrary to what is commonly believed, that the function of the articles is non inherent in them, but that it is determined by the semantic properties of the nouns which select them. Treating this claim as the starting point, the paper focuses on the analysis of various senses of noun phrases, carried out in terms of the functional calculus. The applied method invalidates the extensional theory of the noun accepted by Guillaume, as well as a number of generalisations made by him. The paper shows logical and semantic conditions of some rules governing the use of the article. They differ from those proposed by Guillaume in that they seem to reach a deeper level of linguistic mechanisms. On the other hand, the emphasis is laid on Guillaume's subtle analysis and detailed observations, which stand in a sharp contrast to his rather vague generalizations.


Author(s):  
Jacques Moeschler

The main goal of this chapter is to explain why natural language needs negative predicates to express negative contents. In contrast with syntactic negation, negative predicates exhibit some semantic properties, which are not expressed syntactically: they are complete semantically, restricted to lexical categories, and encode a negative feature. On the other hand, negative predicates are motivated pragmatically: they are stronger statements than syntactic negation; they realize, under syntactic negation, mitigated assertions; they cannot express metalinguistic negation, as syntactic negation does. One relevant semantic proposal (Horn 1989) is the distinction between two negation operators: ¬, realized syntactically, and ©, realized lexically. This chapter does not only give arguments supporting these properties, but also provides an explicit account of the relation between syntactic negation and negative predicates.


2005 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 171-184 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefan Langer

Semi-compositional verb–noun constructions have been investigated under various labels in the different linguistic traditions. In this article we start from the quite well defined notion of support verb construction to present a battery of linguistic tests to distinguish truly semi-compositional constructions from semantically compositional verb–noun combinations on the one hand and from idiomatic constructions on the other. The tests are not genuinely designed by the author but collected from various linguistic investigations on such constructions. As the concept of support verb construction spans across a wide variety of languages, most tests can be applied to several languages. In the article, examples are given for French, English and German. It will be shown that most of the tests that cover the grammaticality of syntactic or semantic transformations of verb–noun constructions only present an approximation of underlying semantic properties and that to almost each alleged property exceptions can be found. However, taken as a whole, the test battery seems to be suitable to delineate support verb constructions from superficially similar linguistic expressions.


2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 52
Author(s):  
Jesse Storbeck ◽  
Elsi Kaiser

The sentence “Bill washed his car, and John did, too” has two possible interpretations if the overt his refers to Bill: (i) a coreferential interpretation, in which John washed Bill’s car, or (ii) a bound variable interpretation, in which John washed his own car. What guides comprehenders’ selection of one over the other? Previous research has identified factors such as processing economy (e.g. Reuland, 2001) and lexical semantic properties of the verb and possessed noun (e.g. Foley et al., 2003; Ong & Brasoveanu, 2014). We extend research on the contribution of possession type to resolution of this type of ambiguous VP ellipsis. We hypothesize that the range of possession types found in natural language varies in the extent to which the possessum is processed as an independent discourse referent or as dependent on the discourse representation of its possessor. Moreover, we expect that such differences modulate the possessum’s availability for coreference and, therefore, affect ambiguity resolution. We conducted an experiment testing how different possession relations modulate adult L1 English speakers’ interpretational preference. Inanimate nouns favored bound variable interpretations more than animates did, supporting our hypothesis that the overt possession’s animacy and its resultant discourse status are important factors in the resolution of the elided possessive pronoun. Follow-up experiments confirmed these results and ruled out nouns’ real-world plausibility of possession as a determinant of interpretational preference. Our results suggest that animate possessions are more likely than inanimates to receive independent status in the discourse and consequently to be available for coreference when the ellipsis is interpreted.


Blood ◽  
1966 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 330-343 ◽  
Author(s):  
JOSEPH F. CONTRERA ◽  
ALBERT S. GORDON ◽  
ARTHUR H. WEINTRAUB

Abstract 1. A two-step method for the extraction of erythropoietin from hypoxic kidneys has been developed which allows residual plasma erythropoietin in renal vasculature to be separated from that of intracellular origin. 2. Renal extracts have been purified by DEAE cellulose chromatography and found to contain 2 major erythropoietically active fractions. One bears strong resemblance to plasma erythropoietin. The other component is unique in that it has practically no erythropoietic-stimulating activity unless previously incubated with normal rat serum. This activation phenomenon is used to identify this kidney component as the renal erythropoietic factor (REF). The REF has the capacity to produce erythropoietin or become erythropoietically active when incubated with normal rat serum. 3. Differential centrifugation technics revealed that the REF is confined to particles present in the light mitochondrial fraction of kidney. 4. Extracts of the light mitochondrial fraction of kidneys from normal rats produced significant amounts of erythropoietin when incubated with normal serum. The quantity found, however, was less than that evoked by similar extracts of kidneys from hypoxic rats. 5. The product of the incubation extracts of the renal light mitochondrial fraction with normal rat serum showed the same log dose/response regression as sheep plasma erythropoietin standard. 6. It is hypothesized that either (a) the REF is a precursor of erythropoietin which must be complexed with a carrier present in normal serum in order to become physiologically active, or (b) the renal factor is an enzyme which produces erythropoietin by its action on a particular serum protein.


2001 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 171-194
Author(s):  
Christopher Culy ◽  
Sarah M.B. Fagan

Donno So, a Dogon language of Mali, has a class of verbs (C3) that exhibits an interesting set of formal and semantic properties. The verbs in this class have different derivational histories; they also have various typs of meaning (middle; middle-related; non-middle). Although C3 verbs cannot be unified derivationally or semantically, they can all be defined both paradigmatically and in terms of phonotactic constraints, like the other two verb classes in Donno So. Comparison with other Dogon languages shows how the middle evolved in Dogon and how Donno So C3 verbs in turn evolved from the middle. These results expand Kemmer's [1993] discussion of the processes invoved in the evolution of middle systems. The comparison also provides some hypotheses about the history of Dogon.


2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 4-41
Author(s):  
Olivier Bonami ◽  
Juliette Thuilier

Rivalry in lexeme formation refers to a situation where multiple, rival lexeme formation processes may be used to fill a gap in a morphological family. In this paper we study one such situation, the rivalry between the suffixes -iser and -ifier in French to derive verbs from nouns and/or adjectives. We propose a statistical approach to the problem, and use multivariate logistic regression applied to a large dataset derived from existing ressources to establish that phonological, morphological, and semantic properties of the morphological family all contribute independently to predicting preference for one or the other suffix. One main result of this study is that rivalry can not be studied in terms of the relationship of a single base and a derived lexeme, as multiple members of the morphological family play a role in jointly predicting the choice of a suffix.


2018 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 139-169 ◽  
Author(s):  
Holden Härtl

Abstract This paper aims at a unified analysis of the different interpretations which constructions involving the German name-mentioning modifier sogenannt ‘so-called’ can adopt. In contrast to nouns like Sepsis ‘sepsis’, a noun like Hotel ‘hotel’, as in sogenanntes Hotel, gives rise to a “distanced” interpretation of the construction rather than one informing about a concept’s name. After a thorough investigation of the lexical-semantic properties, we propose the reading of the construction to emerge from an interplay between lexical factors like the head nominal’s conventionalization, on the one hand, and pragmatic implicatures rooted in relevance- as well as manner-based principles, on the other. From a compositional perspective, the so in sogenannt will be reasoned to be identical in function to quotation marks as a means to refer to a linguistic shape through demonstration. The different interpretations of the construction will be coupled with the type of binding of the agent-argument variable as well as the event variable of the verbal root nenn- ‘call’ of sogenannt.


Author(s):  
J Y Wong ◽  
C F Chiang

A general theory for skid steering of tracked vehicles under steady state conditions on firm ground, taking into account the shear stress-shear displacement relationship on the track-ground interface, is presented. The steering behaviour predicted using the general theory bears a strong resemblance to that observed in the field. The variations of sprocket torques for the outer and inner tracks with turning radius predicted by the general theory are in reasonably close agreement with available experimental data. On the other hand, predictions based on Steeds’ theory developed earlier differ greatly from measured results. Using the general theory, the lateral coefficient of friction used in the conventional method for predicting the moment of turning resistance of the track can be quantitatively determined as a function of turning radius. It is believed that the new theory presented in this paper provides a unified approach to the study of the mechanics of skid steering of tracked vehicles and that it may be extended to the study of transient handling behaviour of tracked vehicles.


Terminology ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tanja Collet

The aim of this paper is to offer an outline of a descriptive grammar — as yet unfinished — of two reduction processes, namely elliptic anaphor and lexical elision, which delete constituents of reiterated complex terms in French LSP texts. After an examination of these reduction processes and the term variants they generate, the paper presents the main building blocks of the grammar. The architecture of these building blocks, i.e. of the deep and surface structure rules which constitute the two levels of the grammar, is derived from the structural and semantic properties of French complex terms. The ordering of the rules in the grammar, on the other hand, is based on characteristics of elliptic anaphor and lexical elision as well as on properties of the term variants produced by these context-conditioned transformations.


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